This Land Is My Land

Then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and stronger than you. Every place where you set your foot will be yours: Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea.  No one will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land, wherever you go.--Peptalk to the Hebrews in the Torah Book of Devarim (Deuteronomy), 11:23-25 

      A sure sign of the decline of an empire is when it starts taking rather than giving orders to its clients. That’s long been the case between huge but sputtering America and tiny but avid Israel. Indeed, it’s accepted in the chancelleries of the world that Washington is little more than Israel’s Luca Brazzi when it come to the Middle East.
     After 3,000 years, the Lord has yet to do as he promised in the Bible/Torah citation above. And the Israelis have found it difficult to realize God’s will purely by their own efforts. So Israel has been relying on the muscle and moolah of the U.S. The agreed current target of both countries is populous, powerful and oil-rich Iran. The aim is to topple its refractory regime and replace it with a tractable one. The means are the usual ones: sabotage, assassination and subversion, the latter lately including cyber attacks. Plus there’s resort to the scare story--by now 33 years old--that the Persians are on the cusp of producing a nuke that they will promptly drop on Israel.
    To prevent this, the Israelis say, the U.S. must front, or at least back, war on Iran. We Americans, despite our self-proclaimed greatness, are used to compliantly asking “how high?” whenever the Israelis tell us to jump. But this time, Obama has said, “No!”
    The reasons should be obvious. American muscle failed in Iraq and Afghanistan and brought only chaos to Libya, countries far smaller and weaker than Iran. The Pentagon is not likely to fare much better against the Iranians. Then again, war in the oil-soaked Persian Gulf would, at best, give us $10 gas and a deeper recession, and, at worst, a generalized conflict in the Middle East that might even set off a world war.
    It’s not only Obama who opposes such folly. He apparently has the support of both the U.S. and Israeli national security establishments.
    For their part, the warhawks consist largely of rightwing Israeli pols and their counterpart neocons here in the states. You know, the people who told us that invading Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” That crowd includes Mitt Romney, who’s proclaimed that there’s not “an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.”
    Being a Dem, Obama cannot be counted upon to stand tall on this or any issue for long. As I’ve noted before, the Rep game is combat and conquest while the Dem game is compromise and capitulation.
    Still, that Obama has already said “No” is all to the good.  Now let’s hope he can gather the gumption to stick to it. Otherwise, we’re in for a world of trouble.

Lost and Found
    There’s nothing new under the sun. But, as any magazine subscriber knows, there is renewal. Years ago, I found, and promptly lost, a terrific quote on the foreign policy of the Roman Empire that sounded amazingly like our own. I couldn’t search for it because I wasn’t sure of the words or who wrote them. They were a mere wisp on the wind.
    Heading for Lambert’s Cove beach the other day, I grabbed up what I thought was a Stan Getz cassette to play in our ancient Corolla wagon. I soon discovered that it was in fact a talk I had I recorded way back when by Michael Parenti, the splendid contemporary radical sociologist.
    A couple of minutes into it, Parenti quoted the brilliant, long gone conservative economist, Joseph Schumpeter.  And there it was--my long lost quote! I experienced a thrill beyond that of discovering a stack of old Playboys in the attic. 
    I’ve been studying up on the American empire for decades. I even visited lands on our long and ever-changing target list. Rarely have I come across such a precise precis of what we’re really up to on the planet as what Schumpeter had to say back in 1918. Here’s a sample:

1. ...a policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not those of Rome, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest---why, then it was our national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people ..."

  Schumpeter went on to ascribe this policy not to foreign but to domestic concerns: “The alternative to war,” he wrote, “was agrarian reform. The landed aristocracy could counter the perpetual threat of revolution only with the glory of victorious leadership...An unstable social structure of this kind merely creates a general disposition to watch for pretexts for war—often held to be adequate with entire good faith—and to turn to questions of foreign policy whenever the discussion of social problems grew too troublesome for comfort. The ruling class was always inclined to declare that the country was in danger, when it really was only class interests that were threatened." --Joseph Schumpeter, The Sociology of Imperialism, 1918.
     Those are the kind of truths that you're not likely to hear from either Obama or Romney.

   

The Dems Down and Dirty

It’s better to vote for something you want and not get it than vote for something you don’t want and get it--Eugene Debs

    What’s new about this particular presidential emulation is that Dems are fighting back, and even dirty, against the Reps.  That’s something they’re usually too timid to try.
    The Dems have little choice. They have no record to run on and no intention of doing anything for ordinary Americans besides making sure that their immiseration continues smoothly and with a minimum of protest. Dumping on Romney/Ryan and the Reps  is their only practical political ploy if they want to get reelected.
    As usual, their angst is all about sounding populist enough to draw voters but not enough to dis their bankster buddies on Wall Street. Obama’s public decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs was a message to the richies that they should ignore his campaign rhetoric and rest assured that he remained their loyal go-fer.
    If the electorate had brains, there are a couple of recent pieces of information that should be rousing it to real political reform beyond the corrupt two-party system with its pretend differences.
The first is that the middle class is shrinking: down from 61 percent to 51 percent of the population in just the last decade. The trend towards ever more moolah at the top and ever less among the lesser classes keeps advancing no matter whether Reps or Dems are in power. In the print edition of my last In These Times column, I ventured that in time 14 families would own the U.S., of which only the Kardashians would be American.
    The second item--to be inscribed in the annals of intense irony--is that Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama has become the king of what was once called merchants of death. The news below might just just stick in the craw of those Norwegian judges:
     “Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals. The American weapons sales total was an ‘extraordinary increase’ over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010...and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of United States arms exports.”
    Currently carrying on more wars in more places than any other president, Obama’s message to mankind is, don’t worry about having to use those complicated weapons we just sold you, we’ll even fight your battles for you at no extra charge.
    I know that some of you are now saying: Yes, but Romney’s worse. You’re probably right--though not by much.  And that’s why, in the spirit of American civic saint Gene Debs, I will again not be voting for either the greater or the lesser evil, but rather for the good.  I'm a Green and our candidate is the estimable Dr. Jill Stein.

Gun Control: Afghan Style

 At the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased.  And the epitaph drear, a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east--Rudyard Kipling

     After a mere eleven years, the empire has so worn out its welcome in Afghanistan that the Pentagon is now warning that our allies there have become as deadly dangerous as our enemies.
    We recruit and train Afghans for the police and army we created for them to better make war on their fellow citizens. Then, instead of thanking us, a rising number of them are turning their weapons on our troops. In a typical incident, an Afghan trainee shot two American soldiers with the assault rifle they had just presented to him for being a good Talib (i.e., student).
    In the Pentagon some say these attacks are the work of Taliban (i.e., students) infiltrators, and some label them as fallout from personal and cultural misunderstandings. The notion that they might be normal expressions of patriotism by a people under a cruel occupation is ignored because we cannot accept that the not-so-great would be anything but delighted at being ruled by the greatest.
   In any event, Pentagon correspondents report that our military leaders have come up with some practical solutions.  One is for our troops to be always armed, locked and loaded in the presence of their Afghan acolytes.  Another is that “guardian angels” be inconspicuously present whenever Americans and Afghans interact. If a raghead makes a funny move, like reaching for his hash pipe, the ‘angels’ could plug him on the spot.
    This, of course, raises the question of whether the learning environment might be compromised with both teachers and students constantly scared of being instantly offed. How can you run a proper class in, say, Torture 101 with everyone watching their back instead of the live demonstration?
    Such are the timeless vexations of imperial warfare. Back in the good old days of the Raj, Indian troops called Sepoys rose in bloody revolt against their British masters. Such outbreaks persisted until the Brits finally gave up their whips and left India to the Indians.
    No doubt, Afghanistan will be left to its inhabitants sooner or or later. And we American will promptly forget that the place exists. Without such an instant memory loss, we might be bothered by the fact that ours, the world’s most powerful, not to say expensive, military was unable in its longest war ever to defeat a ragtag bunch of medieval tribesmen.

Hooray For Social Security
    Along with my 73rd birthday, next week I’ll be celebrating a decade of getting rather than giving moolah to Uncle Sam. 
    All my life, conservatives told me this would never happen. Social Security, they assured me, was on the razor’s edge of going bust. I, let alone my kids, would never see a dime of what we were forced to shell out to this evil socialistic scheme hatched in the Kremlin by Joe Stalin and his Hebrew errand boy, Franklin Rosenfelt. (That’s really the way the Romneys and Ryans of the right talked back then.)
    Despite its venerability, Social Society still gets death threats from Wall Street and its trucklers. SS and its haters are like Fidel Castro and the Miami Cubans. Every waking hour for the last half century they have planned, plotted and prayed for his demise. Street fairs are held if Fidel catches cold. But every morning, there he is, still alive despite the world’s longest running and most expensive hit contract. And so it is with Social Security. It survives all and, I trust, will be around long after Castro, and even Paul Ryan’s great grand kids, finally join the great majority.
    The reason for SS's hardiness is that it’s simple, honest and non-profit. You put money in when you’re young and take it out when you’re old. The money is meanwhile invested in treasuries, the safest paper you can hold. Administrative costs are minimal. After 77 years, it has yet to suffer a scandal: it’s simplicity and transparency makes it hard to rip off.
    Rather than socialism, Social Security is the offspring of anti-socialist conservatism. Bismarck, the arch reactionary Chancellor of Germany in the late 19th century, was fearful of a  red revolution by the country’s beaten down workers. He came up with a package of what we would now call welfare programs to mollify them. It included old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance.  Wiki tells us that “his paternalistic programs won the support of German industry because its goals were to win the support of the working classes for the Empire and reduce the outflow of emigrants to America, where wages were higher but welfare did not exist.”
    The rest of Christendom followed Germany’s example, and the modern welfare state that later included universal health care, free education through college, month-long paid vacations, etc., was born.  We Americans got only partly down that road before a rightwing counterattack stopped our progress toward a a first world social system.
    So why do Wall Street and its yahoo trolls hate SS so much?  Because they see a vast amount of money going to ordinary people rather than rich people. That's in direct violation of the first commandment of capitalism that wealth should only flow upwards and never downwards. And that makes them heartsick. They brood about all the additional bucks they could have had, the fatter yachts, the faster jets, the more monstrous mansions, if only they owned Social Security.
    Of course, the can’t admit to such naked avarice. So they long ago made up this scare story about SS going broke and how we’ll have to privatize it to save it. That movie has been playing ever since SS got its start back in 1935.  We Americans are generally a pretty corporate bunch, preferring to do business with anything with an Inc. behind its name than a U.S. in front of it. Nevertheless, most of us have long since taken SS and Medicare to our hearts.  We find it hard to imagine old age without them. Who besides Rush Limbaugh wants to see grandma begging pennies as she slowly expires in the gutter?
    In fact, SS is robust and its financial problems are minor. When your income hits a hundred grand or so, you stop paying into SS.  By merely eliminating that limit, SS becomes solvent for decades to come.
    Medicare is a different story. It’s money problems will only get worse as the banksters and health profiteers continue to loot it. Such vast and endemic corruption in health care is unknown in Christendom, where single payer, non-profit systems prevail.  Here, where illness and misery are seen as business opportunites rather than social concerns, we can only expect worse to come.
    Anyway, I’ll use part of my next SS payment to buy a bottle with which to toast Social Security and the duffers who are dignified by it.

Precedential Prerogatives
    Presidents set precedents. Bush II set one by invoking a proleptic pinchbeck threat to start a great big shooting war. The U.S., he said, could attack anyone anywhere who might one day pose a danger. No proof was required. The president’s assertion was enough. That gave us debacle without honor in Iraq.
    Obama banked that precedent and added new ones. In Libya, where he imposed what is so far chaos as a replacement for dictatorship, the president said that he could attack any country without even consulting Congress, let alone acknowledging its constitutional war-making power.  Today we're trotting hotly through Syria (on the same side as Al Qaeda!) with barely a peep from press or populace. 
     Of lethal concern to our citizenry is Obama’s Yemen doctrine in which he proclaimed the right to kill Americans simply on his own word. For the time being that word is “terrorism” and/or “national security.” With the precedent of extra-judicial homicide now established, who can say that trigger words like “radical,” “extremist” and “dangerous” will not follow?      Imagine a news story a month or a year from now that reads: Members of a secretive federal task force killed four Occupy protestors in a raid on a Brooklyn apartment. A Justice Department spokesperson said the four radicals posed an “imminent threat to national security, the nature of which can not be disclosed.”
    Or: Five members of the executive board of a union on strike against a manufacturing company in this small Ohio town disappeared four days ago. The local authorities referred questions to the FBI, which refused any comment. A reporter investigating the disappearances returned home to find his apartment ransacked, his computer missing, and his dog poisoned.
    Or: A peppery leftist blogger died in a hit-and-run incident this evening as he strolled home from a local park. Police report no witnesses or evidence at the scene. Any further investigation, they said, would be pointless.
    It is genuinely amazing that, 797 years after the Magna Carta was drawn and 225 years since the U.S Constitution was adopted, I hear well-educated liberals accepting the notion that a ruler, in this case Barack Obama, should have the thumbs down power of life and death over the ruled. It is as if those documents did not exist, that the divine right of kings still obtained, and that George Washington and his fellow extremists should not have bothered.
    Since we’re at war, the Attorney General says that means we can forego due process and kill our enemies, including Americans, by drone process. Sounds reasonable, reply the liberal backers of the adminstration. No matter to them that the war is undeclared, nebulous and open-ended. It is enough for them that the leader intone a word or two to obtain license to violate any law of God or man.    
    Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama has now got us fighting in more wars in more places than at any time since World War II. And even back then, the White House still believed in trying Nazis before hanging them. We’re hearing a lot about Romney eating up companies but little about Obama devouring countries.

Romney Was Right 
    Ohmygod! I hope the little kids were already in bed and the bigger ones out hanging out on friday night when the Olympic opening ceremony came on. How could this ever happen? Shockingly, our supposed supplicants in Britain showed what ingrates and subversives they really are by subjecting us to a proletarian pageant celebrating just about everything real Americans fear and loathe, from socialized medicine and militant workers to unabashed homosexuals and multicultural geeks.
    Any producer on this side of the abyss even suggesting such a show, at prime time on NBC no less, would have  been immediately droned out of showbiz.
    I was frankly flabbergasted. Here we believed we had created a seamless system for eliminating from our public discourse any deprecation of the rich or appreciation of the poor. We had reduced free speech to paid commercial announcements. We had all but banned labor history. We had diminished the epic civil rights struggle to a cliche to be replayed on Martin Luther King’s birthday. We had demonized every foreign country that had a worker friendly government and made sure that no one would dream of trying such stuff here.
    And then, we get stabbed in the back by the Brits, of all tribes! Imagine the effrontery of them celebrating what they dare to call their “treasured” National Health Service on our, yes our, commercial television!
    Things got worse, much worse, as the seditious soiree progressed. Not only were un-American ideas set to song and dance, but agents of anti-American regimes were actually allowed to enter the Olympic stadium without first being harshly interrogated by our TSA.  Incomprehensibly, the Brits even allowed them to freely march around, waving their commie-islamic-atheist-terrorist flags and disporting themselves as if they were regular people.  Where were those vaunted British heavy weapons that were supposed to eliminate such threats to the games?
     Willard Romney, a patriotic American, had been castigated by the pinko London media for questioning the British readiness to deal with security.  Now we know how right he was. It looks like it’s time for the Obama administration to start effecting regime change in Perfidious Albion lest they try to sneak more subversion onto our flat screens.

Individually Rapped

What Christianity, competition and democracy share is that the only thing worse than hearing them questioned is having them practiced--provenance unknown              
 
    We Yanks have been recently ranked the fattest people on earth. Now let’s suppose that our pols and pundits went around praising us for being slim, trim and fit. Imagine they declaimed that, when it came to being svelte, we were a model for the world.
   And so it actually is with rugged individualism (which should be added to the quote above). Rarely has something so fugacious been so flogged. Willard Romney and the yahoos (sounds like a good name for a band), never stop crowing about our unique gift of uniquity. Let those other not-so-great countries wallow in community and cooperation, we Americans stand each of us separate and alone in snickering at their socialistic sensibilities.
    The reality, of course, is that John Wayne and the Marlboro Man caught cancer and dropped dead years ago. Sociologists tell us that, far from being rugged individualists, most of us are closer to being clones than cowboys. In truth, we’re mass produced in consciousness factories where actual individualists get dumped into the misfit bin.    
    We talk a lot about individualism’s supposed spawn of leadership. Are we not the masters of our fate at home and the leader of the free world to boot? Then how come we have a pair of tick and tock parties that limit citizens to an A to B range of politics and policies? How come no real and rugged American leader has come forth to shift the country out of reverse and into high gear?  How come the best we can is do is Willard Romney, who’s about nothing, and Barack Obama, who’s about Romney?
    How come  the collectively organized Chinese are eating our lunch when it comes to ingenuity and avidity?  If bootstrap enterprise is the way out of our economic mess, how come the countries faring best in these hard times are the welfare states of northern Europe and the leftist lands of Latin America?
    Ah, you retort, what about Steve Jobs, everybody’s “I Did It My Way” hero?  Sure, I go along with applauding his creativity and initiative.  But after I finish clapping, what about the tens of thousands of Apple employees and contract drones scraping by on two bites a day. Emulating the Jobs' of the world is not going to create jobs, good ones anyway. Fixing this country will take a collective effort. Everybody together, not everybody alone.


Alexander Cockburn
Editor’s Note:  When I began writing this particular blog, I didn’t know that Alex Cockburn, one of Ireland’s, America’s, journalism’s and the left movement’s true individualists passed away.  Because he made his illness his own business so as preclude its effects on others, I also didn’t know that he had been battling cancer for two years.
     Cockburn was a cantankerous inspiration for all of us who try to abide by the useful bromide that journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
     Counterpunch, one of the best news sites ever, is just part of his legacy of acuity. courage and wit.  It will continue, edited by Cockburn’s associate Jeffrey St. Clair. Anyone interested in the real world ought to read it. On a happier note, everyone ought to rent or rob "Beat The Devil," one of the wittiest movies ever. Directed by John Huston and starring Bogie and a fabulous cast, it was taken from a novel by Claud Cockburn, Alex’s father. Alex used that title for his long running column in The Nation. No one thrashed beezlebub with more panache.

 Excuses, Excuses
    First, an insincere apology for the cheap trick of teasing my reader with the word "sex" in my last blog without actually providing any prurience.  It's an old summer scheme of tabloid editors to keep circulation up over the dog days.

   Second, I’m running a couple of days, maybe even a week, late on the blog.  My excuse is perfectly explained in one of the two photos below I am supplying in lieu of words. Note the  trim young life guard  ready to rescue yours truly, the lord of the beach, from a chilled glass of rosè while he ponders his next rant and checks out the latest in bikini styles. The other is of my vassals at planting time in our extensive domaine. The patty pan squash are not doing so well. Once I clear up that problem, I'll be back at the blog. Stay cool.

     

Sex For Stupidos

Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative--John Stuart Mill 

   What makes yahoos tick? How can rightwingers keep intoning trumpery like a dog that won't stop barking There are progressives (you’ll find them most readily on AlterNet) who are actually looking into the dark void of the conservative cranium to see how the flapdoodle gets cooked up and served.
   One notion, bruited by George Lakeoff, a word wizard at Berkeley, is that our tories tend to come from patriarchal families where pop bosses the brood and teaches right from far right. The result is said to be an exaggerated obeisance to authority and an absence of critical thought. This was summed up nicely back in Watergate days when a Congressman who retained his faith in Richard Nixon exclaimed, “Don’t confuse me with the facts!”
  Researchers also say that righties are successful at pushing their policies because they deliver them with moral and Manichean rhetoric. Indeed, they claim the diety as a dittohead.
   The problem with these premises is that the righties are very picky about the authority they respect and the morality they proclaim. So much so that I can’t think of a more brazen bunch of hypocrites now doing business in the USA. A perfect example is the right’s obsession with gayness, which the Ten Commandments ignore and the Bible abominates only in passing along with such sins as skipping the Sabbath and seducing your sister-in-law. Meanwhile, the good book is brimful of denunciations of usury. Jesus himself chased the money changers from the temple.
  At three score and twelve, I have yet to find the actual harm homosexuals (married or single) do to the social order. But I do know that high interest rip-offs are ruining countless families, while debt of all kind is wrecking our economy. Poor neighbs and the strip malls that ring military bases are chock-a-block with pay day sharks who lend bucks by the week at 300 percent a year. That reads like usury to me.
   You might think that God-fearing teabaggers would have greater concern about their soldier sons and daughters falling into hopeless hock than about whether Oscar and Henry should be allowed to emulate Ozzie and Harriet. I can’t peruse all the news, but I have yet to hear about an outraged congregation picketing the local shylock.
   To give them the benefit of the doubt, it might be that conservatives fret more about lust than lucre because the former doesn’t involve math. With their adoration of the avid, the only financial sin they ever acknowledge is letting a sucker keep his money.
   PS--There’s an inspiring Occupy-type movement in the UK protesting usury and, indeed, the whole credit swindle that has ripped off our economy. We should be building such a movement here.